From my colleague Sean Olson, on the discovery of brackish water 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) beneath the New Mexico desert: The county started drilling an exploratory well in the Rio Puerco about a month ago on the educated hunch there was a large supply of brackish salt water deep within the surface. It was a …
Via Mike Campana, an interesting essay by Chris Milly about the problem climate change poses for the folks who build dams and such: I would argue, in fact, that changing climate is the new “default hypothesis,” rapidly displacing the assumption of stationarity upon which generations of hydrologists and engineers have built their careers—not to mention …
In the June 19 Eos, Vergana and colleagues itemize the impending costs to Andean communities as glaciers, their source of water for both consumption and electricity generation, disappears as a result of climate change: These consequences are akin to a climate tax imposed by energy-intensive societies on populations that have contributed little to the climate …
Mike Campana on the bottled water incident: I remember watching Albuquerque Mayor Martin “El Jefe” Chavez on his cable TV show a few years ago. He had bottled water on his desk. I emailed him, saying that sent the wrong message to viewers. He emailed back, saying that for what it was worth, the bottle …
It’s almost like I never left. When I abandoned California nearly two decades ago, they were fighting about the environmental effects of water diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta for the growing suburbs of Southern California. Still fighting: Warning that a recent boost in water exports is nudging the delta smelt closer to extinction, environmentalists …
When I write my “water in the desert” bits here or at work, I have this underlying image that motivates my thinking. It’s a childhood car camping vacation (one of many, the image is broad and generic). It is before the days of ubiquitous auto air conditioning. We’re driving across the beautiful deserts of the …
In a grand convergence of my two current hobbies (drought and Google maps), Malcolm points to a cool new product by the Australian ABC: a Google map of all of their drought coverage.
Conditions in Georgia are not the worst you’ll find in the southeast, but they look plenty bad – so bad that in this age of cool URL’s, someone down there had the foresight to register GeorgiaDrought.org. From last week’s drought monitor: In Alabama, 68 percent of the cotton crop, 48 percent of peanuts, and 78 …
From Zhengxin: In a problem that is pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a …
paper of the day: From Jia-Lin Lin at the Climate Diagnostics Center in Boulder, more evidence that the models don’t get El Nino right real climate: From the Climate Prediction Center: La Nina’s roaring back real climate II: I saw on yesterday’s bike ride that the Rio Grande is back down, under 1,300 cubic feet …